A Teardrop on the Cheek of Time: The Story of the Taj Mahal (42 page)

However, the claim that Lord William Bentinck, who was the British Governor in the 1830s, considered tearing down the Taj Mahal and auctioning off its marble, only desisting when news came that the first auction in London of Indian artefacts had been a failure, is false. His British enemies in India fabricated the story, which even appeared in an official report. The small kernel of truth upon which they built was that Bentinck attempted to sell the remains of a marble bath from another site in Agra, part of which had been shipped to Calcutta sixteen years previously.

Lord Curzon was himself an aristocrat so haughty that his undergraduate colleagues at Oxford famously coined the following lines, ‘My name is George Nathaniel Curzon, I am a most superior person’, and the seventeenth Earl of Derby later confessed that Curzon ‘makes one feel so terribly plebeian’. Perhaps it was his respect for tradition and position that led him to remedy the effect of neglect on the imperial Moghul architecture of Agra. He later justifiably boasted of his work and of the skill of the craftsmen of Agra. The Taj was ‘no longer approached through dusty wastes and squalid bazaars. A beautiful park takes their place. Every building in the garden enclosure of the Taj has been scrupulously repaired and the discovery of old plans has enabled us to restore the water channels and flowerbeds more exactly to their original state. The skilled workmen of Agra have lent themselves to the enterprise with as much zeal and taste as their forerunners three hundred years ago. Since I came to India we have spent upon repairs at Agra alone a sum of £40,000. Every rupee has been an offering of reverence to the past and a gift of recovered beauty to the future.’ The mention of old plans is, perhaps, the most intriguing point in his statement, but, disappointingly, they can no longer be found in any British or Indian archive.
*

Curzon had a particular love for the Taj Mahal itself. In a speech from the marble plinth he proclaimed, ‘The central dome of the Taj is rising like some vast exhalation in the air. If I’d never done anything else in India, I have written my name here and the letters are a living joy.’ Curzon gave to the Taj Mahal a beautiful brass hanging lamp modelled on one from an old Egyptian mosque. It was suspended from the centre of the interior dome above the imperial cenotaphs, where it still remains.
†

As the twentieth century wore on, the British took further steps to survey and record the Taj Mahal. Between 1941 and 1943, the Archaeological Survey of India, originally established in the middle of the nineteenth century, undertook a particularly detailed series of studies. Although they found the Taj Mahal was in good structural condition overall, they reported that the southwest minaret was tilting by some eight and a half inches and the other three by between one and a half and four and a half inches.

After India regained her independence, the Archaeological Survey of India continued its work and remains responsible for the care and maintenance of the Taj Mahal, which was listed in 1983 as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

In 1965, during the Indo-Pakistan conflict, the Agra airfield was an important operational base for the Indian Air Force. Fearing that the white Taj Mahal might on moonlight nights prove a useful navigational landmark for Pakistani air attacks on the airbase, the Indian Government commissioned local tailors to sew a massive black camouflage net to be draped over the white mausoleum and minarets to diminish their visibility from the air. The net was kept in one of the chambers of the Taj complex until about ten years ago, when, almost entirely consumed by mice, it was finally disposed of.

In the first years of the twenty-first century, terrorism has posed a more direct threat to the Taj Mahal and the Indian Government has stepped up security measures. There are sandbagged bunkers at key points around the complex and a barbed-wire fence between the monument and the Jumna. The teams of security guards now familiar throughout the world at airports and government buildings search bags and frisk bodies, accompanied at times of crisis by dogs sniffing for explosives.

However, probably the greatest threat to the monument is man-made pollution from surrounding factories, power stations, railway yards and passing traffic. The Indian Government has responded with air-pollution measures. They closed 250 factories near the Taj Mahal that lacked control equipment to manage their emissions. Such moves, said to have cost up to 100,000 jobs, were not universally popular in Agra, where people commented,
‘Must we make a tomb of the city to preserve a mausoleum?’

Only lead-free petrol is sold anywhere in Agra and a solarenergy power plant is being constructed so that there will be minimal pollution while power is generated for the area. Only vehicles powered by electric batteries or human or animal muscle power are allowed within 550 yards of the Taj complex. The Archaeological Survey of India have installed a pollutionmonitoring system in the tower at the northeast corner of the mausoleum complex, together with a discreet electronic display which informs visitors in real time of the prevailing level of pollutants such as sulphur dioxide. The Archaeological Survey have made great efforts to remove the yellowing pollutants from the white marble. Some years ago they discovered one of the more successful cleaning agents to be a mixture of clay, cereal, milk and lime, which was recommended by Akbar’s chronicler Abul Fazl as an excellent facial cosmetic for women. The conservators applied the paste about one inch thick and its use produced marked improvements in the colour of the minarets and the interior of the mausoleum. The Indian Government in 2003 halted construction of an entertainment complex, which had begun six months previously just 300 yards from the Taj Mahal, following hints from UNESCO that if they did not do so they would delete the Taj from the World Heritage List.

One of the most pressing concerns is the level and condition of the Jumna. Originally it flowed beside the Taj Mahal so that Shah Jahan could travel easily by boat from the Agra fort to the landing place on the terrace below the mausoleum. Now the Jumna is a much depleted, heavily polluted river some distance from the terrace. In June 2003, thousands of dead fish were found next to the Taj Mahal, killed by a combination of chemical pollution and raw sewage. In 2004, two Indian historians warned that the tilt of the minarets had increased considerably since the measurements undertaken in the 1940s, quoting as evidence a UNESCO survey. However, after undertaking further investigations, the Archaeological Survey of India discovered no cracks at the minarets’ base or on the plinth and concluded that the tilt was either part of the original design to prevent the minarets from crashing inwards onto the mausoleum in an earthquake or the result of subsoil settlement centuries ago. They suggested that differences in the measurement of the tilt were within the bounds of statistical error. The historians do not agree. They believe that, in the absence of the counterbalancing pressure of the Jumna’s waters, the Taj Mahal and its platform may slowly tilt towards the north and that the increase in the tilt of the minarets is the first instance of this phenomenon. They have proposed damming the Jumna downstream of the Taj Mahal so that sufficient water can be built up to restore the original water level and pressure.

Even though the Taj Mahal is now closed on Fridays to allow time for maintenance and other activities, tourism brings its own difficulties. Condensation from the breath of the Taj Mahal’s 3,000,000 visitors a year is one of the biggest problems inside the mausoleum. There being so many visitors also means that it is difficult to enjoy the Taj Mahal in the seclusion that makes it most evocative. However, it would be impossible, and entirely unjustifiable, to restrict visitor numbers. Increasing the entrance price paid by Indian visitors to the higher sums paid by foreigners would prevent large numbers of Indians from seeing their national heritage. Restrictions by nationality to Indians would mean that foreigners could no longer view a building long celebrated as truly unique. As one of Shah Jahan’s poets wrote:

Since heaven’s vault has been standing, an edifice like this
Has never risen to compete against the sky
.

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Possibly these are the same plans said to have been in the possession of the descendants of the draughtsman Ustad Isa in the first half of the twentieth century (cf. pp. 225–6).

†
Curzon may not, however, have understood the sensual passion that was part of the love between Mumtaz Mahal and Shah Jahan, since, instructing his wife about love-making, he reputedly told her that ‘ladies never move’.

16

‘His Own Tomb on the Other
Side of the River’

J
ust as we will never know what lies behind the Mona Lisa’s enigmatic smile, there are unresolved questions about the Taj Mahal. Some may perhaps be solved by further archaeological investigations, but others concern what the grieving Shah Jahan saw in his mind’s eye when he planned the Taj Mahal.

The reason why Shah Jahan and his architects sited the Taj Mahal at the end of its gardens rather than in the middle, as would have been conventional for a mausoleum, has attracted much attention. In the 1970s a respected American historian built on the widely accepted view that the Taj complex was intended to evoke a paradise on earth to suggest that the mausoleum itself was a symbolic representation of the throne of God, which sits directly above Paradise, and that the whole complex was an allegorical interpretation of the Day of Resurrection as revealed by Sufi mystics. The gardens beneath the Taj would represent the plains of assembly for the resurrected upon which God would look down from his white marble throne represented by the Taj Mahal. The strong Sufi sympathies of Shah Jahan’s favourite son and daughter, Dara Shukoh and Jahanara, and his own preoccupation with the creation of extravagant thrones as the symbols of power give some credence to this suggestion. Others have seen the placing more simply as following the tradition in the riverside gardens of Agra of positioning the main pavilion alongside the water to benefit from the views, cool breezes and reflections the Jumna provided.

However, some ten years ago archaeologists from the Archaeological Survey of India and the Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC, began to study the remains of gardens directly opposite the Taj Mahal on the north bank of the Jumna, which are thought to have been on the site of those originally built by Babur and which are known as the ‘Mahtab Bagh’, ‘Moonlight Garden’. By comparing old drawings and plans of Agra they found that these gardens seemed to have contained pavilions and to have been directly aligned with the Taj Mahal. When they began their excavations, the site of the Mahtab Bagh was covered in silt from the flooding of the Jumna and choked with grasses and other plants. Most stone and masonry had been removed over the years to construct dwellings in nearby villages. Some of the brickwork fronting the Jumna had fallen into the river.